Americans can get involved here by organizing a patent protest in the Capital Mall. Get as many programmers together as possible with as many exhibits of how software patents have harmed innovation as possible. Have a march, get the public's attention.
Maybe, just maybe, it will get the attention of someone in power in the US (to fix the issue) and/or someone in power in the EU (to warn them of what could happen).
The biggest problem would be actually getting people there. I, for example, would love to go to such a demonstration, but practically probably could not.
... for at least a year. That's what I'm doing, even though I didn't buy any affected CDs. Yes, they did make token attempts to make things better for some victims, but they NEED to suffer a while for such a stupid decision. Any company that thinks it's OK to install malware on their paying customers' computers does not deserve my business, and it does not deserve yours.
Yes, I know that SONY is a huge company with lots of independent decisions. But it's all one corporation, and it needs to feel pain for this stupidity. Its size just gives us more opportunities to boycott it. No Sony tapes, no Sony TVs, no Sony cameras, no SONY nothing until this year is over.
The boycott needs to be for a limited time; that's why I said a year. If we never start buying from them again, then they lost us no matter what. If the boycott is for a finite time, then they know they can sell to us again ---- as long as they don't repeat this silliness. If they do, they should expect more pain.
Interesting question, and I think it depends on which "God" you're talking about. If the God is arbitrary, with no real revelation of his character, then he would not be falsifiable, and that would be a large problem.
Speaking specifically about the God of the Bible:
For one thing, His motivations are knowable. Scientifically, His motivation was to provide a good place for humans to live, and give them what they need to follow His commands. His motivation now is to reveal himself and his glory and power to us. We should expect scientific advances to show how wise He is in His design.
Also, the God of the Bible does obey physical laws (almost all the time). Jeremiah 33:25 tells us that the laws that govern the heavens are fixed (and relates the fixity of the laws to the sureness of His covenant with us!). Psalm 19:1-4 tells us that what we see in the heavens are what God actually did -- they are not some illusion.
Based on what the Bible says about cosmology, we would not expect the universe to be infinitely old, as was the idea before the Big Bang was discovered. Eventually, the evidence prevailed and gave us a model that is compatible with the Bible. If the God of the Bible is the true God, we can expect similar things to happen in discoveries regarding the origins and development of life over earth's history. And I think that is happening now.
The point is simply put it to the test! If the God of the Bible is the true God, that fact will be clear to anyone who seeks Him and wants to know Him and looks at the evidence with an open mind.
>>> I'll be honest. I've got no problem with the idea of God. I've got no problem with the existence of God. And some things, like the big bang, I have no problem attributing to God, at this time, because I don't forsee us having any more meaningful explanation.
Ok, cool.:)
I guess I would use that to ask what kind of God would have the ability to produce such an event, and what does it say about Him? For example, you have extremely fine-tuned cosmic expansion. The space energy density had to be within one part in 10^60, and the dark matter density/cosmological constant had to be within one part in 10^120 for a universe to form which would have any possibility for life. This is more than 90 orders of magnitude more precise than anything the best human scientists or enginers have been able to produce. Even some atheists have admitted that this is "troubling."
If you look at all the world's religious holy books, I think you'll find that only the Bible describes such a God. It repeatedly describes the universe being created from nothing. At least 10 times in the prophets it talks about God "stretching out the heavens." This is very litterally true, as space itself stretches, and IMHO describes the Big Bang quite accurately. Twice in Jeremiah it says "He stretched out the heavens by His understanding." Reference the last paragraph.:) The Bible is also unique in describing a God that exists outside of time, a necessary condition for His ability to cause the Big Bang.
>>> On the other hand, when we're talking about an area where we understand so much, and have so much evidence for perfectly natural processes being at the root of what we see, it is utter foolishness to try and insert God there. He doesn't fit, and trying to force him in is detrimental to God and to Science.
I assume you're talking about the origins of life? Well, how do they explain the fact that life arose so quickly after the Late Heavy Bombardment in the complete absense of prebiotic soup? Can they explain the homochirality problem?
>>> 1) It leads to an infinite regression. If complex things cannot come to being by themselves, then the creator can't come to be out of nothing either. And so forth. Que the infinite regress of creators.
That would be true within time, but given that time itself has a beginning (something the Bible and science both agree on), it is conceivable that a transcendant Creator could exist outside of time and, therefore, would not really need a beginning. In fact, who else could really have caused the Big Bang, especially with it needing to be so precisely fine-tuned for any life to be possible?
>>> 2) As a scientific theory, it lacks all predictive power. Apply the theory of evolution to, for example, Avian Flu, and you can imagine that, during the course of it's fluish mutations it will hit upon the combination that will make it contagious among the dominant species on the planet, thats natural selection among countless flu variations.
I'm a Christian, but I would assert that we should apply what scientists have learned about biology to the avian flu. No contradiction there. Just because God designed things does not mean we can't learn about them and apply the knowledge.
Further, one *can* build a model about what one should expect if such a God wanted to create an earth for the benefit of man. One would expect that He would waste as little time as possible. Thus, one would expect that life would appear as early as possible on Earth, so that there would be maximum biodeposits for the future use of man. One might expect that the first life would be reletively complex, showing design. Well, that's exactly what observational evidence has shown! We have evidence of complex life existing more than 3.8 billion years ago, only shortly after the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment, which would have eliminated not only all life, but all of its building blocks as well.
Ok, interesting. I've never actually played TEG against humans, so I wouldn't have caught that bug.:) Looks like it should work though.
I like JRisk, but I am just longing for the day when it runs under a Free VM. With gcj/gij 4.0.2, it starts, but doesn't display anything. Probably uses some Swing features not yet in Classpath as of that release. Hopefully it will work with 4.1 and the new Classpath.
Both TEG and JRisk could use better AI, but it's better than nothing.
There are a couple of free Risk-type games, both of which run on Linux and both of which support computer AI and network play:
TEG is a clone of an Argentinian clone of Risk. The basic idea is the same, but there are some differences: 1) After winning a battle, you can move at MOST 3 armies instead of at LEAST 3. 2) Defender also uses 3 dice. 3) You do not take a person's cards when you wipe them out. 3) You get the extra 2 armies from a card when you DRAW the card, not when you play it (which takes out a bit of strategy). 4) You can have as many free-moves at the end of your turn as you want, with the condition that no single army moves more than one consecutive country. There may be more, but that's what comes to mind. The combination of #1 and #4 means that you can not just take out a whole continent in one turn, even with hundreds of armies. You can only move the "horde" one country per turn. Have to admit that I'm hopelessly addicted to this game.
The other is JRisk which, frankly, should be Hasbro's next hit. It does seem to violate their copyright and/or trademark. It's a reasonably faithful clone of Risk.
Regarding B&H, not just a "possible" exception. I was recently helping my Ecuadorian friend get a pro video camera. He saw the "low price" of Pricerite, and suggested I get it there. Fortunately, I checked resellerratings.com and discovered that they're a bunch of unethical crooks before it was too late.
Ordered from B&H, and it was great. They ship exactly what you order and ship it quickly in a well-packed manner. Very professional. Not the lowest possible price, but it's definitely worth it for peace of mind.
Main problem with straddles is that the stock has to move a LOT before you really start to make money. Like, on the order of 20-40%. In most cases it's better to figure out which way you think the stock is moving, and just buy one.
Only if they're naked options, which most "average" investors are not allowed to write. Writing covered calls requires that you already own the stock, and writing covered puts requires that the cash to buy the stock at the strike price be in your account. So there's a limit on losses.
Still, buying options is a heck of a lot more fun than writing them!
>>> North American Christians downplay the Big Bang because it doesn't include the idea that the world was created in seven days.
Right. I understand a lot of them are committed to the 7-day idea. But given that 1) the word translated to "day" has a valid meaning "a long but finite period of time" (in fact it is the ONLY word in ANCIENT Hebrew that CAN have that meaning), 2) there are at least 3 or 4 clues in the text that that meaning is what was intended, and 3) the fact that the rest of the Bible supports the Big Bang so well, my question is [i]why[/i] that view is so common. Believe me, I'm working on fixing it from within the Church.
>>> Reasons to Believe features horrible arguments
Let's be honest here: You can't dismiss everything they say that quickly and easily. I suspect that you haven't taken a good look at their arguments and/or are starting with the [i]a priori[/i] assumption that since it promotes the Bible that it obviously could not possibly have good arguments, and/or don't [i]want[/i] them to have good arguments. They have some high level scientists, including at least one JPL guy, and a new guy who is a research scientist at (IIRC) UCLA. Unlike some "creation scientists" like Kent Hovind, thier PhD's are actually from respectable institutions.
There is plenty of good evidence for design, and no, it doesn't violate the Anthropic Principle.
>>> But a critical thinker is going to see right through this.
So you define "critical thinker" as someone who rejects the Bible up front?
I encourage anyone reading this: Go ahead, test it! What can you lose?
>>> The problem with intelligent design is not that it is implausible, but that it is completely untestable.
Are you familiar with an organization called Reasons to Believe? Their primary goal is to make a scientifically testable model of Creation, specifically as the Bible puts it, from an old earth creation perspective. You may be interested in browsing some of their articles. They publish a book called "Origins of Life" which lays out their model as it relates to earth's early life. A new one called "Who was Adam" looks at their model regarding the origin of humanity.
I agree that ID is untestable in a general sense, but the Bible makes claims that really can be put to the test. One interesting example is in cosmology. The Bible contains repeated declarations by many authors over more than a thousand years that 1) everything that exists had a beginning a finite amount of time ago, and 2) the heavens have been expanding. This is completely incompatible with the "eternal universe" theory that used to be popular, However, that theory has been disproven and now the dominant theory is the Big Bang, which I believe fits what the Bible says to a T. (It simply stuns the heck out of me that most North American Christians try to downplay the Big Bang!)
Predictably, the/. drones are all saying how this idea will cost us freedom and privacy. It's not entirely clear to me how it will do so, assuming they take proper steps to secure it. (And no, I didn't RTFA.) However, it is at least possible that it will have some benefits. I can think of a couple, though related to each other:
1. I am an American living in South America. I've heard that US passports can be sold for about US$5000 here. If muggers know I'm carrying a US passport, I could be a target. But, if the photo is encoded in the chip, that would (supposedly) be impossible to modify, which would render a stolen passport worthless.
2. Related, if stolen passports are worthless for entering the country, it seems as though it really could prevent some undesirables from entering the States.
Overall, I'll need to know how they secure the things to make up my mind, but from my point of view, these benefits could be significant enough to justify it.
Of course, my passport expires next July, so my next one will not likely have this.:(
This is great, but it's not entirely clear to me why it took so long. I once wrote a fully CSS enabled Slashcode theme for a customer, and it didn't even take all that long!
>>> That's just because such "theories" either ignore any inconvenient facts, or revise the "theory of Creation" so that it is impossible to disprove (and then pretend that's what the "theory" said all along). Eventually, they can say (like you did) that their theory has been stable longer than the physically-testable theories, and is therefore somehow "better".
That is exactly NOT what Reasons to Believe does. They put out materials specifically intended to make Creation testable just like any other scientific theory. Their book Origins of Life does a great job of this I think.
>>> much like the fanatics who insist that the Bible is the literal truth say that their "ever-truthful" God created the world thousands of years ago, complete with all the physical evidence that makes us think it is billions of years old.
The young earth movement bases this faith on an interpretation of the Bible which, unfortunately, has permeated most of the North American church. It is based on a hyper-literal interpretation of Genesis using a select subset of allowable definitions for various Hebrew words, and I believe it is absolutely inconsistent with the Bible's message as a whole. The Bible contains dozens of passages with Creation information, not just in Genesis, and a serious interpretation of what it says must take them all consistently. I believe that such a consistent interpretation does not even allow for the reasonability of the young earth model, for Scriptural reasons alone.
Take for example Palm 19:1-2. It tells us that what we see in the heavens is what God actually did. They display knowledge. What we can see is objective reality. Young earthers must say that the light from galaxies billions of light years away must have been created in transit -- flatly contradicting this Psalm!
I might also point out that this is one of the things that made Europe in the 1600s-1700s progress so much farther scientifically than other civilizations before them. These Europeans had a Christian worldview that taught them that the world is objective reality. Other cultures made some scientific progress, but it was crippled by views like astrology, beliefs in various gods that could arbitrarily change anything, etc.
You just need to load all the *1394 modules. There are four of them. If I was at home I could give the specific names.:)
Once those are all loaded into your kernel, just plug the camera in, turn it on and position the tape, and run the dvgrab utility. It will start "play" on the camera and do the transfer automatically. Really pretty easy, and AFAIK, any DV digital camera will work fine.
I'm no expert in Cinelerra (yet) but I did some basic work with cinelerra-cvs earlier this year. My system is a dual-P3 850MHz with 2GB RAM. The program was certainly usable, if a little clunky.
Rendering could be faster, but that's why I'm getting a dual core AMD64 in a few months!
"Drink Pepsi, because if you drink the competitor's vile toilet-bowl cleaner some people pass off as a cola, you are supporting the spawn-of-Satan event that cannot be mentioned, which every four years is taking more and more of YOUR rights away!"
>>> Just a quick question. If you are going to include God, which one?
Good and fair question. I personally believe that there are tests you can run to gain clues. The Creator, assuming He wanted to be discovered, would certainly leave fingerprints of His identity!
First, consider what the Big Bang, assuming it is true, says about the Designer. (And recent cosmological evidence gives us increasing assurance that it is indeed true.) The Big Bang theory implies that:
1) The universe, including all matter, space, energy, and time itself, all had a beginning at one instant a finite period of time ago.
2) It has been continually expanding since then. Not only that, but this expansion was exquisitely fine-tuned. If it had expanded faster from the Big Bang creation event by one part in ten to the 50th power (possibly 60th power), stars with heavy elements could not have formed. Any slower by one part in ten to the 50th, and the universe would have collapsed on itself, or at least stars with light elements (or a mixture of heavy and light) could not have existed. Either way, no life of any kind could have existed at any time nor place in the universe.
3) The universe used to be much hotter than it is now, cooling off by the second law of thermodynamics as the universe expands.
Now, what does this say about the Creator, the Causer of this Big Bang? Here are a couple things:
1) He must exist outside and independent of all space-time dimensions. Otherwise, He could not cause it.
2) He must be at least 20 orders of magnitude more precise than the best human engineers, whose best instruments have a precision of less than one in 10^30.
Now, check all the religious holy books. Which ones describe a God like this?
I believe you will find that the God of the Bible is the only candidate that matches the description. There are a number of Bible verses that talk about how the universe was created out of nothing. Ones that come to mind are Genesis 1:1, John 1:3, Hebrews 11:3, and Isaiah 42:5. Titus 1:2 (and one other, forget ref) imply that time itself had a beginning. (I bet Paul had no idea how literal his statement was!)
There are also about ten verses in the prophets that specifically say that the universe has been expanding, being "stretched out" by God. Some of these are in the past tense, some in the present. Both are, of course, absolutely accurate. My favorite is Jeremiah 51:15, which specifies that "by His understanding He stretched out the heavens." Remember what I said earlier about fine-tuning? That implies a heck of a lot of understanding to me! The afforementioned Isaiah 42:5 has both the creation and expansion in one verse -- "[He] created the heavens and stretched them out."
Romans 8:18-25 also contains hints of the second law of thermodynamics, specifying that the universe is wearing down. Not extremely detailed, but then, it wasn't meant to be. There's another verse that says something similar, forget ref.
In any case, the Bible specifies over and over again that the universe had a beginning and has been stretchiing out. This uniquely fits with Big Bang cosmology. It would NOT be compatible with steady state cosmology, which was popular before the Big Bang was discovered.
>>> Got a question? Here's the answer: Because God made it that way. Done!
I don't think that's what I said. In fact, like I said, I believe we should look for naturalistic explanations. If we ask "why is the sky blue" and someone says "because God wanted it so" and leaves it at that, that doesn't increase knowledge.
>>> And how do you know that there's no evidence for the primordial soup? What reference do you cite for this assertion?
There's a book called Origins of Life by Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross that takes a look at the problems of naturalistic origins of life. It devotes a whole chapter to the soup issue. Been a while since I read it and I can't cite much off the top of my head. But I did show the book once to someone I know who studied early rock evidence in college, and he confirmed that what it says about the soup is true.
First, I agree that solid science should be taught in science class.
What I might question is where our definition of "science" came from, and why does it necessarily have to exclude God?
If God really *did* design the universe and create life, then we would expect naturalistic theories to run into trouble. And I think that has happened. We can see that life has a minimum complexity. We can see that there is no evidence for the primordial soup essential for naturalistic origin of life. We can determine how fine-tuned Earth is for life.
My question is, what will happen to science when the totally naturalistic explanations really do hit a dead end? When can God perhaps be an accepted explanation?
From the evidence we have, a belief in a Designer of life is entirely reasonable. That does not mean we should quit studying, far from it! For the advancement of knowledge, it is important that we try to first seek a naturalistic explanation for everything, to find out how it works. But just as surely, insisting that God *could not* have been involved is every bit as anti-scientific! Just follow the evidence, and see where it leads!
And even the God of the Bible would support that. We are told to "test everything, hold on to the good" in 1 Thesselonians 5:21. A number of verses in the Psalms and Proverbs apply high value to wisdom and knowledge.
I might also throw in the fact that modern science had its birth in Europe a few hundreds years ago, where most people had a Christian worldview. They understood these verses about wisdom, and understood from Psalm 19 that the facts of the universe tell us reality, and tell us about God. This is different than other cultures throughout the centuries, which made some significant progress in various fields, but science came to be "stillborn" eventually, due to beliefs like astrology, the deity of nature, strange requirements of various "gods", etc. The Christian worldview is remarkably different by saying that the reality of the world is objective and knowable.
>>> Well, gee that good and all but here's the question. What if there is no God? Now you just wasted your life believing in that BS.
My life is fine, thank you. And I'm not really concerned about that possibility. I think there are plenty of good reasons to believe in the God of the Bible.
Well, I will believe the Bible over St. Gregory. The Bible does have quite a few negative things to say about sexual sin. Little things like "...the sexually immoral...will not inherit the Kingdom of God."
However, you do have a point. There are plenty of things that could be changed about our culture. Actually, Setting Captives Free does also have a course on replacing gluttony with proper eating habbits.:)
Interesting viewpoint and question from an adult site operator. I'll see if I can answer from a Christian perspective. (I don't know if grandparent poster is a Christian, but he certainly has some similarities to what Christian men go through.)
There are many, many, MANY Christian men who struggle with addiction to pornography. I'm not one of them (thank God!) but the ones who are tell all kinds of stories about wanting to quit viewing it, but simply cannot. I can think of some reasons why this is a problem:
1. Christian women expect their Christian men to be monogomous and faithful to only them. Having their men look at porn is extremely offensive to them, it makes them feel inadequate.
2. Porn gives men unrealistic expectations of what sex should be like.
3. We believe that God created sex to be a PRIVATE expression of love between a MARRIED man and woman. Pornography violates and distorts this in the most complete manner imaginable.
Jesus said, (in Matthew 5:27-28) "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery;' but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart." This is the problem for Christians -- it is IMPOSSIBLE to look at porn without violating this.
I can see why it is a bigger problem for Christians than non-Christians. Non-Christians are simply absorbed into the sex-focused culture of our day, and don't see anything wrong with it. And frankly, that is their problem. I am not going to preach to a non-Christian about proper sexual viewpoints -- if they reject God anyway, what is the point? They might as well live like they want.
Christians also must battle between what their flesh wants and what the spirit of God in them wants. Paul goes on a long lament in Romans 7 that he keeps doing the things he knows he should not do, and does not do the things he knows he should do. This is exactly what porn addicts experience.
I will also point out a great Christian ministry that helps men (and women) get out of this trip. Setting Captives Free. The site has a number of testimonies about how porn has wrecked their lives, and how they were able to find freedom.
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IMHO ...
Americans can get involved here by organizing a patent protest in the Capital Mall. Get as many programmers together as possible with as many exhibits of how software patents have harmed innovation as possible. Have a march, get the public's attention.
Maybe, just maybe, it will get the attention of someone in power in the US (to fix the issue) and/or someone in power in the EU (to warn them of what could happen).
The biggest problem would be actually getting people there. I, for example, would love to go to such a demonstration, but practically probably could not.
... for at least a year. That's what I'm doing, even though I didn't buy any affected CDs. Yes, they did make token attempts to make things better for some victims, but they NEED to suffer a while for such a stupid decision. Any company that thinks it's OK to install malware on their paying customers' computers does not deserve my business, and it does not deserve yours.
Yes, I know that SONY is a huge company with lots of independent decisions. But it's all one corporation, and it needs to feel pain for this stupidity. Its size just gives us more opportunities to boycott it. No Sony tapes, no Sony TVs, no Sony cameras, no SONY nothing until this year is over.
The boycott needs to be for a limited time; that's why I said a year. If we never start buying from them again, then they lost us no matter what. If the boycott is for a finite time, then they know they can sell to us again ---- as long as they don't repeat this silliness. If they do, they should expect more pain.
Interesting question, and I think it depends on which "God" you're talking about. If the God is arbitrary, with no real revelation of his character, then he would not be falsifiable, and that would be a large problem.
Speaking specifically about the God of the Bible:
For one thing, His motivations are knowable. Scientifically, His motivation was to provide a good place for humans to live, and give them what they need to follow His commands. His motivation now is to reveal himself and his glory and power to us. We should expect scientific advances to show how wise He is in His design.
Also, the God of the Bible does obey physical laws (almost all the time). Jeremiah 33:25 tells us that the laws that govern the heavens are fixed (and relates the fixity of the laws to the sureness of His covenant with us!). Psalm 19:1-4 tells us that what we see in the heavens are what God actually did -- they are not some illusion.
Based on what the Bible says about cosmology, we would not expect the universe to be infinitely old, as was the idea before the Big Bang was discovered. Eventually, the evidence prevailed and gave us a model that is compatible with the Bible. If the God of the Bible is the true God, we can expect similar things to happen in discoveries regarding the origins and development of life over earth's history. And I think that is happening now.
The point is simply put it to the test! If the God of the Bible is the true God, that fact will be clear to anyone who seeks Him and wants to know Him and looks at the evidence with an open mind.
>>> I'll be honest. I've got no problem with the idea of God. I've got no problem with the existence of God. And some things, like the big bang, I have no problem attributing to God, at this time, because I don't forsee us having any more meaningful explanation.
:)
:) The Bible is also unique in describing a God that exists outside of time, a necessary condition for His ability to cause the Big Bang.
Ok, cool.
I guess I would use that to ask what kind of God would have the ability to produce such an event, and what does it say about Him? For example, you have extremely fine-tuned cosmic expansion. The space energy density had to be within one part in 10^60, and the dark matter density/cosmological constant had to be within one part in 10^120 for a universe to form which would have any possibility for life. This is more than 90 orders of magnitude more precise than anything the best human scientists or enginers have been able to produce. Even some atheists have admitted that this is "troubling."
If you look at all the world's religious holy books, I think you'll find that only the Bible describes such a God. It repeatedly describes the universe being created from nothing. At least 10 times in the prophets it talks about God "stretching out the heavens." This is very litterally true, as space itself stretches, and IMHO describes the Big Bang quite accurately. Twice in Jeremiah it says "He stretched out the heavens by His understanding." Reference the last paragraph.
>>> On the other hand, when we're talking about an area where we understand so much, and have so much evidence for perfectly natural processes being at the root of what we see, it is utter foolishness to try and insert God there. He doesn't fit, and trying to force him in is detrimental to God and to Science.
I assume you're talking about the origins of life? Well, how do they explain the fact that life arose so quickly after the Late Heavy Bombardment in the complete absense of prebiotic soup? Can they explain the homochirality problem?
>>> 1) It leads to an infinite regression. If complex things cannot come to being by themselves, then the creator can't come to be out of nothing either. And so forth. Que the infinite regress of creators.
That would be true within time, but given that time itself has a beginning (something the Bible and science both agree on), it is conceivable that a transcendant Creator could exist outside of time and, therefore, would not really need a beginning. In fact, who else could really have caused the Big Bang, especially with it needing to be so precisely fine-tuned for any life to be possible?
>>> 2) As a scientific theory, it lacks all predictive power. Apply the theory of evolution to, for example, Avian Flu, and you can imagine that, during the course of it's fluish mutations it will hit upon the combination that will make it contagious among the dominant species on the planet, thats natural selection among countless flu variations.
I'm a Christian, but I would assert that we should apply what scientists have learned about biology to the avian flu. No contradiction there. Just because God designed things does not mean we can't learn about them and apply the knowledge.
Further, one *can* build a model about what one should expect if such a God wanted to create an earth for the benefit of man. One would expect that He would waste as little time as possible. Thus, one would expect that life would appear as early as possible on Earth, so that there would be maximum biodeposits for the future use of man. One might expect that the first life would be reletively complex, showing design. Well, that's exactly what observational evidence has shown! We have evidence of complex life existing more than 3.8 billion years ago, only shortly after the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment, which would have eliminated not only all life, but all of its building blocks as well.
Ok, interesting. I've never actually played TEG against humans, so I wouldn't have caught that bug. :) Looks like it should work though.
I like JRisk, but I am just longing for the day when it runs under a Free VM. With gcj/gij 4.0.2, it starts, but doesn't display anything. Probably uses some Swing features not yet in Classpath as of that release. Hopefully it will work with 4.1 and the new Classpath.
Both TEG and JRisk could use better AI, but it's better than nothing.
There are a couple of free Risk-type games, both of which run on Linux and both of which support computer AI and network play:
TEG is a clone of an Argentinian clone of Risk. The basic idea is the same, but there are some differences: 1) After winning a battle, you can move at MOST 3 armies instead of at LEAST 3. 2) Defender also uses 3 dice. 3) You do not take a person's cards when you wipe them out. 3) You get the extra 2 armies from a card when you DRAW the card, not when you play it (which takes out a bit of strategy). 4) You can have as many free-moves at the end of your turn as you want, with the condition that no single army moves more than one consecutive country. There may be more, but that's what comes to mind. The combination of #1 and #4 means that you can not just take out a whole continent in one turn, even with hundreds of armies. You can only move the "horde" one country per turn. Have to admit that I'm hopelessly addicted to this game.
The other is JRisk which, frankly, should be Hasbro's next hit. It does seem to violate their copyright and/or trademark. It's a reasonably faithful clone of Risk.
> with the possible exceptions of J&R and B&H.
Regarding B&H, not just a "possible" exception. I was recently helping my Ecuadorian friend get a pro video camera. He saw the "low price" of Pricerite, and suggested I get it there. Fortunately, I checked resellerratings.com and discovered that they're a bunch of unethical crooks before it was too late.
Ordered from B&H, and it was great. They ship exactly what you order and ship it quickly in a well-packed manner. Very professional. Not the lowest possible price, but it's definitely worth it for peace of mind.
Main problem with straddles is that the stock has to move a LOT before you really start to make money. Like, on the order of 20-40%. In most cases it's better to figure out which way you think the stock is moving, and just buy one.
> writing options can have a very hefty downside
Only if they're naked options, which most "average" investors are not allowed to write. Writing covered calls requires that you already own the stock, and writing covered puts requires that the cash to buy the stock at the strike price be in your account. So there's a limit on losses.
Still, buying options is a heck of a lot more fun than writing them!
>>> North American Christians downplay the Big Bang because it doesn't include the idea that the world was created in seven days.
Right. I understand a lot of them are committed to the 7-day idea. But given that 1) the word translated to "day" has a valid meaning "a long but finite period of time" (in fact it is the ONLY word in ANCIENT Hebrew that CAN have that meaning), 2) there are at least 3 or 4 clues in the text that that meaning is what was intended, and 3) the fact that the rest of the Bible supports the Big Bang so well, my question is [i]why[/i] that view is so common. Believe me, I'm working on fixing it from within the Church.
>>> Reasons to Believe features horrible arguments
Let's be honest here: You can't dismiss everything they say that quickly and easily. I suspect that you haven't taken a good look at their arguments and/or are starting with the [i]a priori[/i] assumption that since it promotes the Bible that it obviously could not possibly have good arguments, and/or don't [i]want[/i] them to have good arguments. They have some high level scientists, including at least one JPL guy, and a new guy who is a research scientist at (IIRC) UCLA. Unlike some "creation scientists" like Kent Hovind, thier PhD's are actually from respectable institutions.
There is plenty of good evidence for design, and no, it doesn't violate the Anthropic Principle.
>>> But a critical thinker is going to see right through this.
So you define "critical thinker" as someone who rejects the Bible up front?
I encourage anyone reading this: Go ahead, test it! What can you lose?
>>> The problem with intelligent design is not that it is implausible, but that it is completely untestable.
Are you familiar with an organization called Reasons to Believe? Their primary goal is to make a scientifically testable model of Creation, specifically as the Bible puts it, from an old earth creation perspective. You may be interested in browsing some of their articles. They publish a book called "Origins of Life" which lays out their model as it relates to earth's early life. A new one called "Who was Adam" looks at their model regarding the origin of humanity.
I agree that ID is untestable in a general sense, but the Bible makes claims that really can be put to the test. One interesting example is in cosmology. The Bible contains repeated declarations by many authors over more than a thousand years that 1) everything that exists had a beginning a finite amount of time ago, and 2) the heavens have been expanding. This is completely incompatible with the "eternal universe" theory that used to be popular, However, that theory has been disproven and now the dominant theory is the Big Bang, which I believe fits what the Bible says to a T. (It simply stuns the heck out of me that most North American Christians try to downplay the Big Bang!)
Predictably, the /. drones are all saying how this idea will cost us freedom and privacy. It's not entirely clear to me how it will do so, assuming they take proper steps to secure it. (And no, I didn't RTFA.) However, it is at least possible that it will have some benefits. I can think of a couple, though related to each other:
:(
1. I am an American living in South America. I've heard that US passports can be sold for about US$5000 here. If muggers know I'm carrying a US passport, I could be a target. But, if the photo is encoded in the chip, that would (supposedly) be impossible to modify, which would render a stolen passport worthless.
2. Related, if stolen passports are worthless for entering the country, it seems as though it really could prevent some undesirables from entering the States.
Overall, I'll need to know how they secure the things to make up my mind, but from my point of view, these benefits could be significant enough to justify it.
Of course, my passport expires next July, so my next one will not likely have this.
This is great, but it's not entirely clear to me why it took so long. I once wrote a fully CSS enabled Slashcode theme for a customer, and it didn't even take all that long!
>>> That's just because such "theories" either ignore any inconvenient facts, or revise the "theory of Creation" so that it is impossible to disprove (and then pretend that's what the "theory" said all along). Eventually, they can say (like you did) that their theory has been stable longer than the physically-testable theories, and is therefore somehow "better".
That is exactly NOT what Reasons to Believe does. They put out materials specifically intended to make Creation testable just like any other scientific theory. Their book Origins of Life does a great job of this I think.
>>> much like the fanatics who insist that the Bible is the literal truth say that their "ever-truthful" God created the world thousands of years ago, complete with all the physical evidence that makes us think it is billions of years old.
The young earth movement bases this faith on an interpretation of the Bible which, unfortunately, has permeated most of the North American church. It is based on a hyper-literal interpretation of Genesis using a select subset of allowable definitions for various Hebrew words, and I believe it is absolutely inconsistent with the Bible's message as a whole. The Bible contains dozens of passages with Creation information, not just in Genesis, and a serious interpretation of what it says must take them all consistently. I believe that such a consistent interpretation does not even allow for the reasonability of the young earth model, for Scriptural reasons alone.
Take for example Palm 19:1-2. It tells us that what we see in the heavens is what God actually did. They display knowledge. What we can see is objective reality. Young earthers must say that the light from galaxies billions of light years away must have been created in transit -- flatly contradicting this Psalm!
I might also point out that this is one of the things that made Europe in the 1600s-1700s progress so much farther scientifically than other civilizations before them. These Europeans had a Christian worldview that taught them that the world is objective reality. Other cultures made some scientific progress, but it was crippled by views like astrology, beliefs in various gods that could arbitrarily change anything, etc.
You just need to load all the *1394 modules. There are four of them. If I was at home I could give the specific names. :)
Once those are all loaded into your kernel, just plug the camera in, turn it on and position the tape, and run the dvgrab utility. It will start "play" on the camera and do the transfer automatically. Really pretty easy, and AFAIK, any DV digital camera will work fine.
I'm no expert in Cinelerra (yet) but I did some basic work with cinelerra-cvs earlier this year. My system is a dual-P3 850MHz with 2GB RAM. The program was certainly usable, if a little clunky.
Rendering could be faster, but that's why I'm getting a dual core AMD64 in a few months!
Advertise the competition thusly:
"Drink Pepsi, because if you drink the competitor's vile toilet-bowl cleaner some people pass off as a cola, you are supporting the spawn-of-Satan event that cannot be mentioned, which every four years is taking more and more of YOUR rights away!"
>>> Just a quick question. If you are going to include God, which one?
Good and fair question. I personally believe that there are tests you can run to gain clues. The Creator, assuming He wanted to be discovered, would certainly leave fingerprints of His identity!
First, consider what the Big Bang, assuming it is true, says about the Designer. (And recent cosmological evidence gives us increasing assurance that it is indeed true.) The Big Bang theory implies that:
1) The universe, including all matter, space, energy, and time itself, all had a beginning at one instant a finite period of time ago.
2) It has been continually expanding since then. Not only that, but this expansion was exquisitely fine-tuned. If it had expanded faster from the Big Bang creation event by one part in ten to the 50th power (possibly 60th power), stars with heavy elements could not have formed. Any slower by one part in ten to the 50th, and the universe would have collapsed on itself, or at least stars with light elements (or a mixture of heavy and light) could not have existed. Either way, no life of any kind could have existed at any time nor place in the universe.
3) The universe used to be much hotter than it is now, cooling off by the second law of thermodynamics as the universe expands.
Now, what does this say about the Creator, the Causer of this Big Bang? Here are a couple things:
1) He must exist outside and independent of all space-time dimensions. Otherwise, He could not cause it.
2) He must be at least 20 orders of magnitude more precise than the best human engineers, whose best instruments have a precision of less than one in 10^30.
Now, check all the religious holy books. Which ones describe a God like this?
I believe you will find that the God of the Bible is the only candidate that matches the description. There are a number of Bible verses that talk about how the universe was created out of nothing. Ones that come to mind are Genesis 1:1, John 1:3, Hebrews 11:3, and Isaiah 42:5. Titus 1:2 (and one other, forget ref) imply that time itself had a beginning. (I bet Paul had no idea how literal his statement was!)
There are also about ten verses in the prophets that specifically say that the universe has been expanding, being "stretched out" by God. Some of these are in the past tense, some in the present. Both are, of course, absolutely accurate. My favorite is Jeremiah 51:15, which specifies that "by His understanding He stretched out the heavens." Remember what I said earlier about fine-tuning? That implies a heck of a lot of understanding to me! The afforementioned Isaiah 42:5 has both the creation and expansion in one verse -- "[He] created the heavens and stretched them out."
Romans 8:18-25 also contains hints of the second law of thermodynamics, specifying that the universe is wearing down. Not extremely detailed, but then, it wasn't meant to be. There's another verse that says something similar, forget ref.
In any case, the Bible specifies over and over again that the universe had a beginning and has been stretchiing out. This uniquely fits with Big Bang cosmology. It would NOT be compatible with steady state cosmology, which was popular before the Big Bang was discovered.
Hope this helps!
>>> Got a question? Here's the answer: Because God made it that way. Done!
I don't think that's what I said. In fact, like I said, I believe we should look for naturalistic explanations. If we ask "why is the sky blue" and someone says "because God wanted it so" and leaves it at that, that doesn't increase knowledge.
>>> And how do you know that there's no evidence for the primordial soup? What reference do you cite for this assertion?
There's a book called Origins of Life by Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross that takes a look at the problems of naturalistic origins of life. It devotes a whole chapter to the soup issue. Been a while since I read it and I can't cite much off the top of my head. But I did show the book once to someone I know who studied early rock evidence in college, and he confirmed that what it says about the soup is true.
First, I agree that solid science should be taught in science class.
What I might question is where our definition of "science" came from, and why does it necessarily have to exclude God?
If God really *did* design the universe and create life, then we would expect naturalistic theories to run into trouble. And I think that has happened. We can see that life has a minimum complexity. We can see that there is no evidence for the primordial soup essential for naturalistic origin of life. We can determine how fine-tuned Earth is for life.
My question is, what will happen to science when the totally naturalistic explanations really do hit a dead end? When can God perhaps be an accepted explanation?
From the evidence we have, a belief in a Designer of life is entirely reasonable. That does not mean we should quit studying, far from it! For the advancement of knowledge, it is important that we try to first seek a naturalistic explanation for everything, to find out how it works. But just as surely, insisting that God *could not* have been involved is every bit as anti-scientific! Just follow the evidence, and see where it leads!
And even the God of the Bible would support that. We are told to "test everything, hold on to the good" in 1 Thesselonians 5:21. A number of verses in the Psalms and Proverbs apply high value to wisdom and knowledge.
I might also throw in the fact that modern science had its birth in Europe a few hundreds years ago, where most people had a Christian worldview. They understood these verses about wisdom, and understood from Psalm 19 that the facts of the universe tell us reality, and tell us about God. This is different than other cultures throughout the centuries, which made some significant progress in various fields, but science came to be "stillborn" eventually, due to beliefs like astrology, the deity of nature, strange requirements of various "gods", etc. The Christian worldview is remarkably different by saying that the reality of the world is objective and knowable.
>>> Well, gee that good and all but here's the question. What if there is no God? Now you just wasted your life believing in that BS.
My life is fine, thank you. And I'm not really concerned about that possibility. I think there are plenty of good reasons to believe in the God of the Bible.
Well, I will believe the Bible over St. Gregory. The Bible does have quite a few negative things to say about sexual sin. Little things like "...the sexually immoral...will not inherit the Kingdom of God."
:)
However, you do have a point. There are plenty of things that could be changed about our culture. Actually, Setting Captives Free does also have a course on replacing gluttony with proper eating habbits.
Perhaps you could show me where I indicated desire to limit your freedoms?
Interesting viewpoint and question from an adult site operator. I'll see if I can answer from a Christian perspective. (I don't know if grandparent poster is a Christian, but he certainly has some similarities to what Christian men go through.)
There are many, many, MANY Christian men who struggle with addiction to pornography. I'm not one of them (thank God!) but the ones who are tell all kinds of stories about wanting to quit viewing it, but simply cannot. I can think of some reasons why this is a problem:
1. Christian women expect their Christian men to be monogomous and faithful to only them. Having their men look at porn is extremely offensive to them, it makes them feel inadequate.
2. Porn gives men unrealistic expectations of what sex should be like.
3. We believe that God created sex to be a PRIVATE expression of love between a MARRIED man and woman. Pornography violates and distorts this in the most complete manner imaginable.
Jesus said, (in Matthew 5:27-28) "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery;' but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart." This is the problem for Christians -- it is IMPOSSIBLE to look at porn without violating this.
I can see why it is a bigger problem for Christians than non-Christians. Non-Christians are simply absorbed into the sex-focused culture of our day, and don't see anything wrong with it. And frankly, that is their problem. I am not going to preach to a non-Christian about proper sexual viewpoints -- if they reject God anyway, what is the point? They might as well live like they want.
Christians also must battle between what their flesh wants and what the spirit of God in them wants. Paul goes on a long lament in Romans 7 that he keeps doing the things he knows he should not do, and does not do the things he knows he should do. This is exactly what porn addicts experience.
I will also point out a great Christian ministry that helps men (and women) get out of this trip. Setting Captives Free. The site has a number of testimonies about how porn has wrecked their lives, and how they were able to find freedom.